Political Science

When newly liberated African American slaves attempted to enter the marketplace and exercise their rights as citizens of the United States in 1865, few, if any, Americans expected that, a century and a half later, the class divide between black and white Americans would be as wide as it is today. The United States has faced several potential key turning points in the status of African Americans over the course of its history, yet at each of these points the prevailing understanding of African Americans and their place in the economic and political fabric of the country was at best contested and resolved on the side of second-class citizenship. This text seeks to answer the question of what the United States would look like today if, at the end of the Civil War, freed slaves had been granted full political, social, and economic rights. It does so by tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education, and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between the promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four articles, written by scholars of African American studies and across every major social discipline, the book presents a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy affords readers an uncommon overview and integration of the eclectic body of knowledge of American bureaucracy. One of the major dilemmas facing the administrative state in the United States today is discerning how best to harness for public purposes the dynamism of markets, the passion and commitment of non-profit and volunteer organizations, and the public-interest-oriented expertise of the career civil service. Researchers across a variety of disciplines, fields, and subfields have independently investigated aspects of the formidable challenges, choices, and opportunities this dilemma poses for governance, democratic constitutionalism, and theory building. This literature is vast, affords multiple and conflicting perspectives, is methodologically diverse, and is fragmented. Each of the articles in this text identifies major issues and trends, critically takes stock of the state of knowledge, and ponders where future research is most promising. The book is one of Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior offers comprehensive coverage of the various theoretical approaches to the study of American elections and political behavior. The articles provide broad overviews of intellectual developments and challenges, as well as incisive commentary on the accomplishments of, and challenges facing, scholars of American politics. Substantively, the Handbook includes articles focusing on various approaches and issues in research design, political participation, vote choice, presidential and non-presidential elections, and issues, interests and elites as influences on individuals' political behavior. Each of the articles offers a working research bibliography, as well as retrospective evaluations of research and discussions of fruitful paths for future research. This book is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time – and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups is a major new volume that aims to help with the assessment of the current state of scholarship on parties and interest groups and the directions in which it needs to move. Never before has the academic literature on political parties received such an extended treatment. Thirty articles critically assess both the major contributions to the literature and the ways in which it has developed. With contributions from most of the leading scholars in the field, the Handbook provides a definitive point of reference for all those working in and around the area. Equally important, the articles also identify areas of new and interesting research. The articles offer a distinctive point of view, an argument about the successes and failures of past scholarship, and a set of recommendations about how future work ought to develop. This Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of academic experts, its chapters provide an assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Emphasizing changes in the mass media and communications technology the vast number of cable channels, websites and blogs, and the new social media, which are changing how news about political life is collected and conveyed they describe the evolving information interdependence of the media and public opinion. In addition, the handbook reviews the wide range of influences on public opinion, including the processes by which information communicated through the media can affect the public. It describes what has been learnt from the latest research in psychology and genetics, and studies of the impact of gender, race and ethnicity, economic status, education and sophistication, religion, and generational change, on a wide range of political attitudes and perceptions. The handbook includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments using the latest technological advances.

Animal studies is an interdisciplinary field that captures one of the most important topics in contemporary society: how can humans rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals? This “animal question” is the focus of The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. In the last few decades, animal studies has flourished, with the widespread recognition of (1) the commodification of animals in a wide variety of human contexts, such as the use of animals as food, labor, and objects of spectacle and science; (2) the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction; and (3) the increasing need to coexist with other animals in urban, rural, and natural contexts. These themes are mapped into five major categories, reflected in the titles of the five parts that structure this volume: “Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics, and Public Policy”; “Animal Intentionality, Agency, and Reflexive Thinking”; “Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle, and Sport”; “Animals in Cultural Representations”; and “Animals in Ecosystems.” Each category is explicated with specially commissioned chapters written by international scholars from diverse backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy. The thirty chapters of the handbook investigate issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia’s distinctive politics—both ancient and modern—at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation’s Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia’s unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia’s political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centre on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration cover how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. This Handbook is an opportunity for others to consider the nation’s unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The Oxford Handbook of British Politics has been conceived, not just to illustrate both the breadth and depth of scholarship that is to be found within the field, but also to demonstrate the vibrancy and critical self-reflection that has cultivated a much sharper and engaging, and notably less insular, approach to the terrain it seeks to explore and understand. In showcasing the diversity now found in the analysis of British politics, the Handbook is built upon three foundations. The first principle that underpins the volume is a broad understanding of the political. It covers a much broader range of topics, themes, and issues than would commonly be found within a book on British politics. This emphasis on an inclusive approach also characterises the second principle that has shaped this collection namely, diversity in relation to commissioned authors. The final principle focuses on the distinctiveness of the study of British politics. Each article seeks to reflect on what is distinctive both in terms of the empirical nature of the issue of concern, and the theories and methods that have been deployed to unravel the nature and causes of the debate. This Handbook draws upon the intellectual strengths of the study of British politics, reflects the innate diversity and inclusiveness of the discipline, isolates certain distinctive issues and then reflects on their broader international relevance, and finally looks to the future by pointing towards emerging or overlooked areas of research.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Politics provides a comprehensive overview of the transformation that has occurred in Canadian politics since the country achieved autonomy, examining the institutions and processes of Canadian government and politics at the local, provincial, and federal levels. The book represents the work of distinguished contributors, including some of the world's most prominent scholars of political science. Canada officially achieved legislative autonomy in 1931 and has since developed into one of the world's most prosperous democracies. Though its political system is widely commended for its stability and fairness, it is nonetheless extremely complex. Particularly within the past five decades, Canada has undergone a vast social and political revolution, as exhibited by events such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the ratification of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Medical Care Act of 1966, and the official adoption of bilingualism and multiculturalism. As the world moves toward globalization, technology has likewise facilitated communication between previously isolated provinces and territories within Canada. Such developments hold significant implications for the role of Canadian politics, both domestically and internationally. This text analyzes all aspects of the Canadian political system: the courts, elections, political parties, Parliament, the constitution, fiscal and political federalism, the diffusion of policies between regions, and various aspects of public policy. It examines recent trends such as the movement toward minority Parliaments, and extrapolates potential developments.

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities. It is also an intervention in its own right, seeking to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century by advancing two interconnected arguments. First, we argue that the motif of order is a powerful yet insufficiently utilized heuristic device for making sense of Schmitt’s thought. By placing the motif of order at its heart, we contradict the popular belief that no unifying thread runs through the jurist’s oeuvre. Second, we argue that a trinity of thought is discernable in Schmitt’s writings comprising his political, legal, and cultural thought. We establish intellectual connections across these three bodies of thought and trace the mutually constitutive relationships that exist among them. Schmitt’s thought, we find, amounted to a network of ideas about the sources of social order, the cement of society.

The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States presents an extensive, multidimensional overview of the church and state in the United States. Study of church and state in the United States is incredibly complex. Scholars working in this area have backgrounds in law, religious studies, history, theology, and politics, among other fields. Historically, they have focused on particular angles or dimensions of the church𠇓state relationship, because the field is so vast. The results have mostly been monographs that focus only on narrow cross-sections of the field, and the few works that do aim to give larger perspectives are reference works of factual compendia, which offer little or no analysis. In this book, twenty-one articles offer a scholarly look at the intricacies and past and current debates that frame the American system of church and state within five main areas: history, law, theology/philosophy, politics, and sociology. These articles provide factual accounts, but also address issues, problems, debates, controversies, and, where appropriate, suggest resolutions. They also offer analysis of the range of interpretations of the subject offered by various American scholars.

In the past two decades, “civil society” has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations. Interest in the topic exploded with the decline of statism in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of our current debates about politics and social policy are informed by the renewed focus on civil society. Broadly speaking, The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society views the topic through three prisms: as a part of society (voluntary associations), as a kind of society (marked out by certain social norms), and as a space for citizen action and engagement (the public square or sphere). It does not focus solely on the West (a failing of much of the literature to date), but looks at civil society in both the developed and developing worlds. Throughout, it merges theory, practice, and empirical research.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This handbook presents assessments of classic works in public policy and administration by an international collection of contemporary scholars. These classic works include books written by such illustrious intellectuals as Mancur Olson, Elinor Ostrom, and Herbert Simon. The list of contributors offering assessments of these classic works is impressive as well, featuring scholars such as Peter John, David Lowery, and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Each chapter of the handbook presents a classic work, lays out its treatment in the years and decades since its publication, and comes to an assessment of its place in the field of public policy and administration. The collection of classic works demonstrates the breadth of the field of public policy and administration, touching on topics ranging from mobilization and political participation to decision-making across types of organizations and levels of government. Although public policy and administration may not in some respects constitute a well-defined area of inquiry, this collection demonstrates that there is a core of classic works that have had a seminal impact in the field, broadly construed, over time and across national and continental boundaries. The collection also elucidates enduring interactions between public policy and administration and other social scientific disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and especially political science.

The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society presents an analysis of this issue that draws on the best thinking on questions of how climate change affects human systems, and how societies can, do, and should respond. Key topics covered include the history of the issues, the social and political reception of climate science, the denial of that science by individuals and organized interests, the nature of the social disruptions caused by climate change, the economics of those disruptions and possible responses to them, questions of human security and social justice, obligations to future generations, policy instruments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and governance at local, regional, national, international, and global levels.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory provides an entry point into this burgeoning field by both synthesizing and challenging the terms that motivate it. The handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking. Entries emphasize exploration of substantive questions about political life—ranging from domination to political economy to the politics of knowledge—in a range of global contexts, with attention to whether and how those questions may be shared, contested, or reformulated across differences of time, space, and experience. They connect comparative political theory to cognate disciplines including postcolonial theory, area studies, and comparative politics. Creative organizational tools such as tags and keywords aid in navigation of the handbook to help readers trace disruptions, thematic connections, contrasts, and geographic affinities across entries.